I'm looking to build a 3D workstation for personal projects and to work at home and I'm not sure if I should wait for the next generation of hardware in a few months. I'm hitting the 32-bit memory limits... but the software I used hasn't fully moved to 64-bit.

I already have two X2 4200+ machines - used for rendering. The X2 4200s are wicked desktops machines, but I feel the dual core-ness not being utilized in apps like Maya (rendering is a different story). Also, a 15-30% jump in performance could mean 2x the price of one of my X2 4200.

If I bought a Opteron 175 and tried to overclock it would I get a large day-to-day performance boost in the apps I use? Or is overclocking just for show? What about the FX-60? It doesn't seem to be a big step faster than the 2.4 Ghz CPUs and it's a chunk more expensive (I could spend it on a nice video card, but most 3D apps are really CPU-bound).

You'll have to get Win xp Pro since win xp home does not have the coding for a multi-processor system. I'd stay away from XP64 for the time being, since it still doesn't have a lot of support in the way of drivers, and even though it will run 32-bit programs, there are some incompatibilities.

I went for a dual Opteron 270 system (huge price drop). However, my old old copy of Windows XP (upgrade version circa 2002) thought my 300GB SATA2 drives were 150GB drives. I tried a bunch of (ahem) other copies with similar results.